Cognition’s creative director Brian Pope doesn’t lead with worldbuilding or even technology, whether that's the use of Unreal Engine 5 or photogrammetry. He starts with preservation, or as he puts it, “Lunar Strike was actually originally developed as the idea of a game being used to tell both the story and the purpose behind archiving endangered heritage.”
That idea of archiving doesn’t stay abstract for long; instead, it starts to dictate how everything else is framed in the game. Set a century from now, Earth is ravaged by climate change, wars and ambitious future-forward thinking has ground to a halt. Against this backdrop, the Moon – Shackleton Station, at the lunar south pole, to be precise – becomes a storage site, a place of residue for data, debris, human traces - some deliberate, others left behind without ceremony, scattered across the lunar surface.
